


Doodles

by earlgreytea68



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-10
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-10-02 00:39:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10204772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreytea68/pseuds/earlgreytea68
Summary: Rita brings in a postcard from the Outer Rim and all it has on it is Juno’s name and office address and a doodle of…who knows what.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kenopsia (indie)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/gifts).



> This is for kenopsia, who recced this podcast. Thanks!

The annoying thing about Peter Nureyev—okay, there are a lot of annoying things about Peter Nureyev but here’s one for today:

He won’t go away. 

He is really, really, _really_ bad about going away. 

For a man who’s supposedly a master criminal, who’s a self-professed expert on _disappearing_ , he _lingers_ a lot. He leaves the scent of his cologne behind. He makes escapes and then doubles back for you. He doesn’t leave even when explicitly told—ordered—to go. 

He doesn’t leave even when he wakes up to an empty bed and how much more goddamn obvious can you be than _that_? 

Nureyev is seriously the fucking _worst_ at disappearing, but Juno supposes that shouldn’t surprise him because Nureyev can tell the truth but he can also lie like a bearskin rug in a low-rent pornographic photo shoot and it was Nureyev who claimed to be good at disappearing when he’s really terrible at it. 

Rita brings in a postcard from the Outer Rim and all it has on it is Juno’s name and office address and a doodle of…who knows what. None of Nureyev’s doodles ever looked like anything to Juno. On…The Night…that they spent together, Nureyev had doodled on Juno’s back, like that was a thing people did, when Juno had never heard of anything so stupid in his entire life, and when Juno had said that, Nureyev had said brightly, “Shall I doodle with my _tongue_ , then?” 

Although at that point, for this tiny brilliant period of time, Nureyev had been traitorously _Peter_ in Juno’s brain and it had been Peter who had brightly offered to doodle with his tongue and Peter who laughed when Juno grumbled about how filthy that sounded and what kind of dame did Peter think he was and Peter who did other things with his tongue that later Juno told him he’d never heard called “doodling” before and Peter who laughed and laughed…

…before falling into that deep sleep that was such a goddamn stupid way for a master criminal to sleep, it was a wonder he hadn’t been killed long before this. 

“What do you think this is, Mr. Steel?” asks Rita, and Juno glances at it without interest and sees the doodle and snatches it out of her hand. “Oh,” says Rita. “Is it _important_?” 

“What?” says Juno. “No, it’s not important. It’s…it’s like the least important thing I’ve ever seen in my life. What the hell even is it? Pointless…scribbling…stupid thing. And the Outer Rim? Who cares about the Outer Rim? Nothing good ever came out of the Outer Rim. This is not important. This is stupid. Throw it away.” Juno hands it back across to Rita. 

Rita studies the doodle. “Why would someone send you a picture of scissors?”

“That’s what you think that is?” 

“It’s obviously scissors,” Rita says, and leaves Juno’s office with it. 

Juno sits at his desk and drums his fingers against it and finally shouts, “Rita!” 

“Yes, Mr. Steel?” Rita shouts back. 

“Don’t you think you need to go and get us some lunch?” 

“We just got back from lunch,” Rita points out. 

“We need more lunch,” Juno barks. “Do you have to question everything I say so incessantly? Can’t you just do as I ask because I’m paying you to? Can’t that be an adequate reason?” 

“I’ve never seen you eat two lunches, is all,” says Rita. 

“It’s a new thing I’m trying,” says Juno. “I’m sick of my girlish figure. Can you just get out of here?” 

“Fine,” huffs Rita, and stalks out of the office. 

Which gives Juno the opening he wanted to hunt through the garbage to find Nureyev’s doodle. 

Smooth, he thinks. Rita probably never suspected a thing. 

***

“Oh, look,” says Rita. “It’s another one of those doodles you love.”

“What?” yelps Juno, and then modulates his voice. “I mean, what. What doodles? I don’t love them. I don’t care about them. They’re not important. I had you throw the other one out. Who cares about the doodles? What are you even talking about? What about this weather we’re having, huh?” 

Rita gives him a look like he’s being weird, as if weird is something he’s just started being, as if weird isn’t all of Hyperion City, and really, in the midst of _Hyperion City_ , Juno is the least weird thing in it. All of those people acting like fools out there over loves that won’t last and money they can’t take with them and deaths that can’t be avoided. He, Juno Steel, is the least weird among them. 

Rita hands him the postcard, and this one is from Mercury, and again has nothing but his name and address and an incomprehensible doodle. 

Rita says, “It’s a bhospor bush.” 

Juno says, “I knew that.” 

***

Juno is in the middle of a stake-out. It’s the usual cheating-husband nonsense, and Juno’s sick of cheating-husband cases, but they’re easy money and hey, it means that sometimes Juno gets to ruin the love lives of other people instead of his own for a change. 

The stake-out requires Juno to be on the grounds of one of the city’s highest-class whores, whose client list is a closely guarded secret, which is why Juno has to be on the grounds to see who’s there, because the comings and goings are so wrapped in secrecy that it would take a world-class thief to penetrate them. Which Juno is not. Juno’s just a second-rate private eye—literally, _eye_ \--who’s hiding on the grounds under a bush that Juno is beginning to realize he might be allergic to, if the persisting watering in his one remaining eye is any indication. 

Rita in his ear says, “Mr. Steel?”

Juno tenses. “What?” he whispers. “Who’s coming?” 

“No one,” Rita says. “Just thought you’d like to know you got another of those postcard drawings.” 

“What? Why would I want to know that? Why would you interrupt my stake-out to…Listen. Rita.” Juno sighs heavily. “I don’t want to know about the postcard drawings. Okay? I don’t want to hear any more about the postcard drawings. If you get another postcard drawing, throw it in the trash and don’t bring it up to me. Got it?” 

Rita says, “This one’s a hat, and it’s walking. It has little hat legs.”

“The legs are made of hats, too, or—wait. You know what? Never mind. I don’t care. Didn’t I just say that I don’t care?”

“It’s got six legs,” says Rita. “They’re not hats. They’re furry.” 

Juno says, “ _Rita_. Enough about the postcard drawings.” There’s a moment of silence. Juno adds, “Anyway, would we call them drawings? Aren’t they more like doodles?” 

Rita says, “Do you know what this reminds me of?”

Juno doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know and switches his comm off and that’s partly why he gets caught later and thrown off the grounds of the city’s highest-class whore after his remaining eye is introduced to a few new fists. 

Juno blames Peter Nureyev for all of this. 

***

There’s another postcard drawing propped on his desk. 

“That one’s a smiley face!” Rita shouts to him. 

Juno pretends to throw it in the trash but of course he slips it into his pocket. 

***

Juno is following another cheating spouse into a part of Hyperion City where he doesn’t normally go. It’s a classy part—that’s why he doesn’t normally go there—and he sticks out like a bikini at a monastery, in his eye patch and bedraggled trench coat. He’s attracting attention, and not the kind he likes when he’s following someone, so he ducks into an alley, just for a second, to spy on the crowd from a vantage point where they can’t spy on him. 

And he _swears_ that he recognizes a person on the other side of the crowd, swears that he recognizes the way he’s holding himself, the line of his nose, the curve of his cheek, the sharp fox’s teeth in the—

Juno blinks and the person is gone, completely vanished, and the crowd is swirling around Juno, and Juno didn’t even realize he’d stepped out of his hiding place in the alley. He feels disoriented and his head is aching and he goes home and crawls into the bottom of a bottle and doesn’t take down any of the postcard doodles he’s tacked up on the wall in his kitchen because he is a goddamn pathetic loser. 

***

It’s Rita’s day off, and Juno is tempted not to go into the office at all. Rita, after all, would never know, and Juno had a tough night last night: another stake-out gone wrong, another new fist acquaintance for his eye. His eye is making friends left-and-right. His eye is gunning for debutante of the goddamn year. 

Juno sips his first cup of coffee of the day and squints at the doodles on the kitchen wall. Every day he thinks maybe he’ll look at them and they’ll magically _look_ like something. 

They never do. 

***

When the mail comes, there’s another postcard doodle. Juno wishes Rita was there to tell him what it is. 

***

Juno walks into his apartment to the scent of Nureyev’s cologne and really, it’s a testament to how _truly pathetic_ Juno is but there’s a very long moment where he just assumes that’s in his head. Sometimes he smells Nureyev in his apartment, out of nowhere. That is totally normal and probably connected to the Martian tumor-thing that ate up his eye. Probably a side effect of all of that is “hallucinating the cologne of the man you kind of dumped after he asked you to run away with him and you told him yes because, actually, of the two of you in that relationship, _you_ were the liar and that’s saying something when the other person in the relationship is a man without a name.” 

Then Nureyev’s voice says, “You know, the first time a master thief breaks into your house, it can be excused. But the second time it happens—actually, it can still be excused. I’m a very good thief. You couldn’t keep me out.” 

Juno looks from the doodles on the kitchen wall to Nureyev, sitting on the couch on the wall adjacent to them. 

Nureyev lifts an eyebrow at him. 

Juno says wearily, “I could have kept you out. I didn’t think it was necessary. I thought you’d stay out on your own. I thought you’d _take the fucking hint_.” 

“I’m very bad at hints, Detective,” Nureyev says. 

“Yeah, I’ve noticed,” says Juno. “What do you want?” 

“What happened to your eye?” 

“I took this Martian pill and then I was held hostage for a couple of weeks by this totally unhinged anthropologist—”

“Your other eye,” says Nureyev. 

“Oh, that eye,” says Juno. “Yeah, it’s a very outgoing eye. It’s always getting into trouble, hooking up with fists. It’s pretty reckless.” 

“Too bad you can’t control this reckless eye you have,” remarks Nureyev evenly, watching him. Nureyev, of course, has two reckless eyes of his own but neither of them are bruised and both of them are present and bright even in the darkness. Juno can’t understand how Nureyev is a master thief when everything about him is so goddamn _bright_ all the time. 

“No, seriously,” Juno says. “What do you want? What are you trying to steal?” 

“You,” Nureyev says simply. “I’ve been trying to steal you for quite some time now. You’re the only thing in my entire life that’s been truly elusive. Well, you and the Fountain of Youth but do you know that I’m beginning to think the Fountain of Youth doesn’t exist?” 

There are lots of things Juno could say to this, chief among them _Don’t be an idiot_ and _What if I don’t want to be stolen_ and _Don’t show up here and be so goddamn charming at me, what the fuck_. What Juno hears himself say is, “Are you so sure _I_ exist?” 

Nureyev leans forward on the couch, and the apartment is small enough, and Juno’s drifted close enough, that he can snatch Juno’s hands, hold them loosely in his own. “Yes,” he says, with that smile he has that makes all of Juno’s thoughts take swan dives out of the uppermost floor of Juno’s brain. “I spotted Juno Steel once. It was quite the sighting. I’ve been chasing him ever since. He’s hard work but then again, in my experience, thieves only fall for the scores they can’t make. That’s how thieves meet their downfalls.” 

Juno looks at his hands in Nureyev’s nimble pickpocketing ones. Juno says thickly, honestly, feeling exhausted, “I don’t want to be your downfall, Nureyev, I don’t—”

Nureyev pulls and Juno goes because Juno is too tired not to go. He ends up somehow basically on Nureyev’s lap and his face presses into Nureyev’s neck because his eye, well, likes to make friends. 

Nureyev says, “There was this moment when I was a Peter to you and that was a _lovely_ moment. I’m not Peter to anyone else in the universe. How often do you think that moment comes around? In the Martian calendar?” 

“The Martian calendar makes no fucking sense,” Juno says. 

Nureyev laughs, a rumble in his chest that Juno feels, and sometimes Juno wishes he could still read minds just so they could cut to the chase and Juno could know why Nureyev is still here. 

So Juno tries to cut to the chase. “Why are you still here? Why are you so goddamn bad at _leaving_?” 

“I’m still here because you’re still here,” Nureyev says. “I told you I wouldn’t disappear and I meant it. _You’re_ the one good at disappearing. So go, Juno Steel. Disappear.” 

Juno has lifted his head up and is staring at Nureyev in astonishment. “This is my apartment,” he points out. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“I know,” Nureyev whispers. “That’s why I broke in. I don’t necessarily play by rules, you know.” 

“You don’t say,” Juno drawls. “I’m shocked. I thought you got to be a master criminal by minding all of your p’s and q’s. Do they know, your criminal friends, how much you refuse to play by rules?” 

“They might have an inkling,” says Nureyev. 

“I told you to go,” Juno says desperately, because if he doesn’t say it he’s just going to kiss Nureyev because it’s been too goddamn long since he kissed Nureyev. 

Nureyev says, “No, you didn’t. You left. I don’t recall you telling me to go. So tell me.” 

Juno’s one good eye—and calling it “good” at this point is a massive overstatement—meets Nureyev’s two bright ones, and Juno knows when his bluff is being called, but he’s always been a terrible gambler, and he completely fucks it up now, he completely _folds_. 

Nureyev leans forward and nips on Juno’s bottom lip with those teeth Juno’s kind of learned to be obsessed with and breathes, “Tell me. Tell me to go, with my doodles all over your wall, and my hands down your pants, and my name on your lips. Tell me to go.” 

And maybe this doesn’t really change anything. All the things inside of Juno that make him broken are still there, inside of Juno, still broken. They haven’t gone away. 

But neither has Peter Nureyev. 

Juno takes a deep breath. Juno says, “When did you get your hands down my pants?” 

Nureyev smiles. “Pickpocket trick,” he says. “Sleight of hand. Want to see more?” 

“Maybe,” Juno says. “Can you pull a rabbit out of somewhere?”

“Let’s see,” says Nureyev. 

***

By morning light, Peter’s doodles are still as abstract as they ever are to him. Having Peter in the room with him doesn’t suddenly make them coalesce into beautiful landscapes or anything. 

Peter, nosing behind his ear, says, “Did you like the doodles?” 

“Yeah,” Juno lies. “I love them. That’s why I have them up.” 

“Really?” Peter sounds amused. “Which one is your favorite?” 

Juno thinks wildly, then says, “Uh, the bhospor bush one. Definitely.” 

Peter says, “Bhospor bush?” 

“Yeah,” Juno says uncertainly. “That’s what it is, right?”

“Juno,” says Peter. “Those aren’t doodles. Those are a code.” 

Juno stares at him. “A what,” he says flatly. 

“A code. You seemed to want a code so badly. I sent you a code.” 

“A code,” Juno says. “What do they say?”

“Hmm. They say, ‘Juno Steel is an incredibly cranky detective and he’s very lucky that he has an incredible master thief with a really impressive—’”

“Liar,” Juno accuses, giving him a little shove, as Peter laughs and laughs like he’s _hilarious_. “You goddamn liar, they _are_ just doodles.” 

“Yes.” Peter smiles fondly. “But there’s no bhospor bush in there.”

“You’re the worst doodler in the entire fucking universe,” Juno tells him, and then on the heels of it, because if he doesn’t ask now, he never will. “Did you really think of me in all those places in the postcards?”

“Darling,” says Peter. “I never left Hyperion City.” 

Juno blinks. “But…the postcards.” 

“Simple trick.” Peter shrugs. “I’ve been here this whole time. You even spotted me once, on a street, and I would have stayed to talk to you, except I was worried you weren’t quite in the right frame of mind to talk to _me_.” 

Juno thinks back to that day, wonders what he would have done if he’d been able to corner Peter. Wonders if he would have done _this_. He says, “Why did you think I would be in the right frame of mind now?” 

“Lucky guess,” Peter says. “Just a lucky guess.” There’s a beat. “Also, I just had to talk to you again, I couldn’t bear it any longer.” 

And Juno stares at him and finds himself saying, “Yeah. Me, too.”


End file.
